A couple things about Decker’s Creek.

When I was younger, Decker’s Creek was in terrible shape. I mean, really terrible. It was bright orange from mine runoff/acid mine drainage, and there wasn’t much life in there, and what was there, you expected to mutated.

After a LOT of work, the Decker’s Creek watershed is now thriving, and the rail trail along Decker’s Creek is (with the exception of the bit through Sabraton) gorgeous.

Pictures are marked with the GPS coordinates of where I stopped to take the pictures. Assuming all the GPS photos aren’t completely blurry and unrecognizable.

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A month or so ago, Michael and I had an argument about what you call an object such as the one he is standing next to here.

One of us said, “trunk” and the other said, “stump.”

Who is correct (or is there a more accurate term)?

Also, one of us has a degree in Forestry.

This was actually a couple weekends ago, but, I forgot to post the pictures.

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I somehow managed to pre-order two copies of Magic Rises.

Anyone interested? If you are, leave a comment. I’ve got ONE book, so first response gets it.

On a related note, why the HELL do these books come out on a MONDAY? I received Magic Rises AND Kitty in the Underworld, but as I need SLEEP, I can’t read EITHER right away, because both are books I’ll almost certainly read straight through in one sitting.

Damnit.

I think that I’ve generated enough data now.

Couple things: where the pedometer is placed affects the step count. I wore the pedometers in several configurations: on my waistband, in my pocket and a combination of both. When they were on my waistband together (Friday), the Omron and the Pulse gave the closest results. When in my pocket together (Monday), the Pulse had a slightly higher count than the Omron.

The Fitbit always had a higher count, averaging 800 steps more than the Omron. (The Pulse averaged 15 steps more than the Omron.)

The Pulse and the Omron were relatively close in counting active minutes, with the Pulse being higher, due to the fact that you have to be active for ten minutes before the Omron starts that time.

A couple things I didn’t mention previously:

The Pulse has the ability to measure pulse rate. You hold the device between your fingers, cycle through the menu until you find the heart (pulse rate) icon, touch that icon and it measures your pulse through your finger. If you have the Pulse in the wrist band for sleeping, make sure the device is resting over the pulse point in your wrist and start the measurement.

It looks like the measurements are relatively accurate on average, but not very precise for any single measurement. The chart is hard to read, but I would take several measurements, one right after the other. The results are clustered around what should be the correct value, but can fluctuate wildly.

I’ll probably play with the pulse measurement more in the coming days, but for now, I’m not that impressed with it. Which is fine, because I wasn’t that interested in that option.

The battery life on the Pulse is nowhere close to as long as the battery life of the FitBit, however, on a positive note, the way it charges, through a short mini USB cable, means I’m less likely to forget to put it back on. (I had to resort to charging the FitBit at work, and taking off my shoes and putting the charging station on my shoe, to remind me to put the thing back on.) I also like the charging monitor better, and think I won’t have the same charging issues I did with the FitBit (sometimes I would put it on the charging station, and it wouldn’t charge, or the display wouldn’t update to show me that it was charging, so I generally had to fuss with it).

Another point in the favor of the Pulse is that it’s a brand new device and so the phone and web applications are still being developed, and one of the things that will be added is the ability to download your data as a CSV file. I have NEVER been happy with the fact that FitBit wanted to charge you a subscription to download YOUR OWN DATA, and that the data is “allowed” you to have was in no way the full data set you created.

I am hoping that the data set the Pulse generates will be closer to that created by the Omron. I’ll let you know how that one goes as well.

One additional thing I haven’t tested is wearing the Pulse while hiking and biking. I’ll be curious to see how accurate that data is compared to the data generated by my new Oregon.

No updates yesterday, because yesterday was all napping and reading.

The FitBit continues to significantly over-count steps. The Pulse vacillates around the total for the Omron, sometimes over, sometimes under. Interestingly, for the entire time period, the Pulse averaged out to one step more than the Omron. The FitBit averages 783 steps more than the Omron.

The FitBit is obviously delusional with regard to Active Minutes.

I’ll be very interested to see today’s totals.

When we were at Wheeling, we wandered into the glass museum (against my better wishes, I might add, since Michelle + Breakable Stuff = Trouble Found. There, I saw Fenton Glass Beads.

I usually pick jewelry because I find it interesting or amusing, but these I liked just because they are pretty.

When we were at the Ripley Craft Fair, Fenton had a table that was staffed by two of the women who paint the beads.

I made Michael buy me some.

This was the bead that pushed me over the edge.

Of course, I had to get the sesquicentennial bead:

I couldn’t get just two, now could I?

So I now have five hand-painted Fenton glass beads, and want more, because they’re gorgeous, and they’re made here in West (by God) Virginia.

Gotta support the state economy, right?

Obviously, I need more data points.

WOW.

Here are the end of the day totals:

Average of Differences Wed – Fri

Steps
FitBit: 774
Pulse: -559

Active Time
FitBit: 230
Pulse: 20

A quick note about Active Time. You have to be moving for ten minutes before the Omron begins to count active time, so it won’t count any walk 9 minutes or shorter, no matter how quickly I walk. For the FitBit, I combined Fairly Active and Very Active minutes; for the Pulse, I combined moderate and intense activity, although over the three day span I had less than 5 minutes of “intense activity.”

I think that the Pulse is correct in the amount of “intense activity” I had. I was pretty lazy this week during my walks.

Also, I’m not quite done today–I still have laundry and a couple other chores that will have me up and moving around. So I’ll look at this again tomorrow.

YAY! More data!

I wore three pedometers today: my regular FitBit, the Pulse, and the Omron. Again, I set the Omron as the standard against which the other two were judged.

All three pedometers were worn on my waistband.

Here are the totals over the course of the day:

(I noted what I was doing during the time periods. If not noted, assume mostly sitting around. I noted the driving solely because none of the pedometers gave me any steps while I drove, which is good.)

Here are the steps and differences each time period:

Tomorrow, I’ll get my end-of-the-day counts for the three days, and see how things came out at the end of the day.

And NOW, I am going to attempt to enjoy the start of my weekend.

I’m going to update this through the course of the day.

I’m wearing the Withings and my beat-up FitBit next to each other, clipped to my belt. The Omron and the old FitBit that don’t hold a charge are inside a cargo pocket.

Yes, I AM putting this into Excel, calculating the differences, and I’ll probably make a chart of it. Like I do.

I WILL DO SCIENCE TO IT

FitBit = clipped to belt
Pulse = clipped to belt
Omron = in pocket
FitBit 2 = in pocket

8:15 AM
FitBit: 1099
Pulse: 912
Omron: 1013
FitBit 2: 1147
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Because I am a HUGE DORK I wore three pedometers today: The Omron HJ-720ITC Pocket Pedometer, the Fitbit Ultra, and a brand new Withings Pulse.
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Today’s word is: statistics

I wasn’t kidding about how much I love collecting data on things. Somewhere around here I have a sheet noting the cold water temperatures over the course of six months.

But this is pedometer data, specifically, the number of steps taken. FitBit didn’t give me any other particularly useful data, so I worked with what I had.

Total Steps: May 2009 – July 2013

Note that there are no steps June 2010. And really, there are only steps for half of May. Because that’s when I broke my ankle. You can see it took a year and a half before I got back to where I was before the break.

Yearly Totals
2009: 2507143
2010: 2117909
2011: 2410617
2012: 3645755
2013: 1761365
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So, Michael pulled out my data. I have to say what he could get wasn’t impressive.

What interests me is the activity data: how many steps, how many miles, how many flights of stairs, steps over the course of the day, what time of the day I’m most active…

So. I got daily totals for steps and distance.

Yeah, not really impressive. But, at least it’s something to play with.

Here we have weekly steps. That peak in July 2012 was our vacation. The trough immediately following was the discovery of my cousin Ben’s death and his funeral. Talk about literal highs and lows…

The low point of the end of Dec 2012 / start of Jan 2013 was vacation week, where I laid around and read books and didn’t do much of anything else.

The lowest point was when I got pink eye AND some kinda virus the same week, and my only activity was getting up to go to the room of resting.

Here is the data presented by month. Please note that I removed the partial months of January 2012 and July 2013.

Interesting to note that the drops from October through March correlate with a rather nasty bout of depression. That was kind of a vicious circle: I didn’t walk because I was depressed, and the less I exercised, the more depressed I got. But you can see I’m slowly getting back on track.

Something else I’d like to point out, is that FitBit didn’t give me any steps for bicycling, so a 20 mile bike ride counts for nothing as far as FitBit is concerned. But as far as my MOOD is concerned, it’s exercise, and definitely counts.

Once I figure out the best way to do so, I’m going to take the data from my Omron pedometer and combine it with the FitBit data, and that should give me close to five years of data. What I wish I had was some calculable measure of my depression over those five years, so I could see how my exercise and depression relate over time.

Not sure how to do that, however, since typically I don’t even realize I’m going through a bout of depression until I’m well into it. And it’s very hard to gauge “how depressed am I today” since that tends to be a comparison only to the previous day or two, which isn’t a very accurate measure.

So, there’s the first of my data crunched. Once I figure out how to combine this with my Omron data, you can expect EVEN MORE EXCITING data, looking at steps over an even LONGER period of time!